A Year in XLOOKUP

The first in a short series about, of all things, Spreadsheets, which I might brand My Excel Year. A year in which out of necessity I had to use Excel because the entire rest of my usual working toolkit was unavailable to me.

“Really Paul? REALLY? you’re going to write about Excel on THIS blog?”

Four Reasons:

  • I suffered and now so must you (or, I learned things and so can you).
  • Needs must sometimes and i’m want to focus on Excel as a useful and practical tool. How to make it so that your team will actually use it.
  • I considered doing these on LinkedIn as part of the purpose of this is for LinkedIn related reasons, but I am keen on adopting indieweb principles.
  • Finally, how to make it look good while doing it. How it can be used to present knowledge as well as track data and information.

I’m planning a pretty big personal project and this is going to be the toolset.

So, coming soon in whatever order I want:

  • How to use Excel to run User Testing for an Information Architecture.
  • Matrix Layouts (Power/Influence Grids, Risk Matrix, that kind of thing).
  • Data Quality Crosschecking.
  • Backlogs and GANT/Sprint Visualisation.
  • The RAID? / RAAIDD? / ARIAD? logs and what have you.
  • Visualising Problem and Defect Tracking.
  • Personas and User Stories, Problem Statements and Options Appraisals.
  • A branching dialogue tree planner that can be ran in the document.